The Tenant (2 page)

“I know what I am saying. We are both old people, and we don’t like noise. So I warn you right now that if you are married and have children you could offer me a million francs and I wouldn’t accept.”

“You can stop worrying about that, Monsieur Zy. You won’t have that kind of trouble with me. I am very quiet myself, and I am a bachelor.”

“Bachelors can be a problem, too. If you want the apartment as a place to entertain your girl friends, then this is not the house for you. I would rather take two hundred thousand and give it to someone who really needed it.”

Trelkovsky nodded. “I agree completely. And I am not that kind of person. I’m a quiet man, and I don’t like complications. You won’t have any with me.”

“Don’t be offended by all of these things I am asking you now,” the landlord said. “We might as well understand each other from the first, and then we can live together without disagreement.”

“You’re perfectly right; it’s the only logical thing to do.”

“In that case, you must also understand that I can’t permit you to have animals here—cats, dogs, or any other kind of animal.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“Well then, Monsieur Trelkovsky—I can’t give you an answer yet, of course; there can’t be any question of that as long as the former tenant is still alive. But I like you; you give me the impression of being a serious young man. So I will just say this: come back later in the week. At that time, I should be in a position to give you a definite reply.”

Trelkovsky thanked him profusely before leaving. As he passed in front of the concierge’s room, she glanced at him curiously, without the slightest sign of recognition, and went back to the interrupted routine of drying a plate with the skirt of her apron.

He paused on the sidewalk to study the outside of the building. The upper floors were bathed in the light of the September sun, giving it the appearance of being almost new and fresh. He looked for the window of “his” apartment, but immediately remembered that it looked out on the courtyard.

The whole of the fifth floor had been repainted pink, with the shutters in a canary yellow. The harmony was not subtle, but the note of color it gave to the building had a happy tone. There were boxes of green plants all along the windows of the third floor, and on the fourth, grills had been added to heighten the support rail of the balcony—because of children, perhaps, although that did not seem likely, since the landlord did not want children. The roof was studded with chimneys of every size and shape. A cat, which certainly did not belong to any of the tenants, was strolling among them. Trelkovsky smiled to himself, imagining that it was he who was up there, instead of the cat, being gently warmed by the rays of the sun. But then he noticed a curtain moving on the second floor, in the landlord’s apartment, and walked hastily away.

The street was almost deserted, doubtless because it was still the lunch hour. Trelkovsky stopped and bought himself some bread and a few slices of garlic sausage. He sat down on a bench and considered matters as he ate.

After all, perhaps the argument he had used with the landlord was correct, and the former tenant would come back and want to exchange the apartment. Perhaps she would recover. He sincerely hoped she would, of course. But if she didn’t, perhaps she had left a will. In that case, what were the landlord’s rights in the matter? Would Trelkovsky be obliged to pay the fee twice—once to the landlord, and again to the former tenant? He wished that he could talk to his friend Scope, who was a lawyer’s clerk, but unfortunately he was out of town on some sort of business.

“The best thing to do is to go and see the former tenant in the hospital,” he thought.

As soon as he had finished eating, he went back to the building to question the concierge. She informed him, with ill-concealed bad temper, that the tenant’s name was Mademoiselle Choule.

“Poor woman!” Trelkovsky said, and wrote the name down on the back of an envelope.

2
The Former Tenant

T
he next day, at precisely the prescribed visiting hour, Trelkovsky entered the door of the Saint-Antoine hospital. He was wearing his only dark suit, and in his right hand he carried a pound of oranges wrapped in an old newspaper.

He had always had a very unhappy reaction to hospitals. It seemed to him that he could hear a final rasping breath behind every window, and that the instant he turned his back they would begin moving out the corpses. He considered both doctors and nurses as monsters of insensitivity, in spite of the fact that he admired their devotion to duty.

At the information window, he asked where he might find Mademoiselle Choule. The young woman on duty consulted her cards.

“Are you a member of the family?” she asked.

Trelkovsky hesitated. If he answered in the negative, would they just send him away? Finally, he said, “I’m a friend.”

“Ward 27, bed 18. See the head nurse first.”

He murmured a word of thanks and went in. Ward 27 was enormous, as big as the main lobby of a railroad station. Four rows of beds stretched down its entire length. Around the white shapes of the beds clustered little groups of people whose somber clothing formed a startling contrast. It was the rush hour for visitors. A continuous murmuring, like the roar of the sea imprisoned in a shell, drummed at his ears. A woman in white snatched at his arm and thrust out her jaw aggressively.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Are you the head nurse?” Trelkovsky asked, and when the jaw nodded he said, “My name is Trelkovsky. I’m very glad I found you, because I was told at the information desk to see you first. It’s about Mademoiselle Choule.”

“Bed 18?”

“That’s what I was told. May I see her?”

The head nurse frowned, put a pencil between her teeth, and chewed on it thoughtfully before answering.

“She can’t be disturbed,” she said at last. “She was in a coma until yesterday. Go ahead, but be very careful, and don’t try to talk to her.”

Trelkovsky had no great trouble finding bed 18. A woman was stretched out in it, her face covered with bandages, and her left leg suspended by a complicated system of pulleys. The single eye visible through the bandages was open. Trelkovsky approached the bed very quietly. He could not tell whether the woman had noticed him, because the eye did not blink, and she was so heavily bandaged that he could see nothing of the expression on her face. He put the oranges on the bed table and sat down on a little stool.

She seemed older than he had thought she would be. She was breathing with great difficulty, her mouth wide open, like a black well in the center of a white field. He noticed, with an acute sense of embarrassment, that one of her upper incisor teeth was missing.

“Are you one of her friends?”

He jumped, involuntarily. He hadn’t noticed the other visitor. His forehead, which was already damp, broke out in little pearls of sweat. He imagined himself in the place of a guilty man about to be denounced by a witness he had forgotten. All sorts of insane explanations flashed through his mind. But the other visitor, a young girl, was already talking again.

“What on earth could have happened? Do you know why she did such a thing? At first, I just wouldn’t believe it. When I think that I saw her the night before, and she was in such good spirits! What could have happened to her?”

Trelkovsky breathed a sigh of relief. The girl had obviously classified him at once as a member of Mademoiselle Choule’s large circle of friends. She wasn’t really asking him a question; she was simply stating her position. He studied her more closely.

She was pleasant to look at, because without being pretty she was exciting. She was the sort of girl: Trelkovsky conjured up in his imagination during the most private moments of his life. Insofar as the body was concerned, at least—a body which could perfectly easily have done without a head—it was well rounded, but without softness or fat. The girl was wearing a green sweater which threw the line of her breasts into sharp relief, and because of her brassiere—or the absence of a brassiere—he could distinguish the point of the nipples. Her navy-blue skirt had climbed to a point well above her knees, but this was the result of negligence, not calculation. The fact remained that a considerable portion of flesh was visible beneath the elastic strap that held her stocking. This milky, shadowed flesh of the thigh, extraordinarily luminous just before it dipped to the somber regions at the center, hypnotized Trelkovsky. He had difficulty detaching his gaze from it and looking up again at the girl’s face, which was absolutely commonplace. Chestnut hair, vaguely chestnut eyes, a large mouth awkwardly disguised with lipstick.

“To tell you the truth,” he began, after having cleared his throat, “I’m not really a friend. I scarcely knew her.”

Modesty forbade him from admitting that he didn’t know her at all.

“But believe me, I’m terribly sad and upset about what happened.”

The girl smiled at him. “Yes, it’s terrible.”

She turned her attention back to the prostrate figure on the bed, which seemed still to be unconscious, in spite of the one open eye.

“Simone, Simone,” the girl murmured, “you recognize me, don’t you? It’s Stella; your friend, Stella. Don’t you recognize me?”

The eye remained steadily fixed, contemplating some invisible point on the ceiling. Trelkovsky wondered if she might not be dead, but just then a moaning sound came from the mouth, stifled at first, then swelling to an unbearable scream.

Stella began to weep noisily, embarrassing Trelkovsky enormously. He was tempted to go “Ssh,” in her ear, because he was certain that everyone in the room was looking at them, thinking he was responsible for her tears. He glanced furtively at their nearest neighbors, to see how they were reacting. On his left, an old man was sleeping, his body twitching constantly beneath the covers. His lips mouthed a flow of unintelligible words, while his jaw moved rhythmically up and down, as though he were sucking on a giant bit of candy. A thread of blood-tinged saliva ran down the side of his face, to disappear in the whiteness of the sheet. On the right, a fat, alcoholic peasant stared in wonderment at the food and wine being unpacked by the group of visitors around his bed. Trelkovsky was relieved to see that no one was paying any attention to Stella and himself. A few minutes later, a nurse came up to tell them that they must leave now.

“Is there any chance of saving her?” Stella asked. She was still weeping, but only intermittently.

The nurse glanced at her irritably. “What do you think?” she demanded. “If we can save her we will. What more do you want to know?”

“But what do you think?” Stella said. “Is it possible?”

The nurse lifted her shoulders in annoyance. “Ask the doctor; he won’t tell you any more than I just have. In this kind of thing . . .” Her voice assumed a tone of importance, “. . . no one can really say. The fact that she came out of the coma is enough for now!”

Trelkovsky felt vaguely let down. He had not been able to talk with Simone Choule, and the fact that the poor woman had one foot in the grave did nothing to comfort him. He was not a selfish or an evil young man, and he would honestly have preferred to remain in his present unhappy situation, if by doing so he could have saved her.

“I’m going to talk to this Stella,” he thought. “Perhaps she can tell me some of the things I don’t know.”

But he had no idea of how to strike up a conversation, because the girl persisted in weeping. It was difficult to bring up the subject of the apartment without first having prepared the ground. On the other hand, he was very much afraid that the moment they left the hospital she would hold out her hand and say good-by, before he had had a chance to decide what to do. And as if this were not bad enough, a sudden violent need to urinate made it impossible for him to entertain a coherent thought. He forced himself to walk slowly, in spite of the fact that all he wanted to do was race breathlessly to the nearest toilet.

At last, he summoned up courage to attack the problem. “You mustn’t give in to your grief,” he said, as calmly as possible. “If you like, we could go and have something to drink. I think it would help you.”

Then he bit his lips until they bled. His need was becoming monstrous, intolerable.

She tried to answer, but a sort of hiccup cut through the words. She gave him a sad little smile, and her head bobbed in a gesture of acceptance.

The sweat was pouring from Trelkovsky’s forehead like rain. Need punched at his belly like a strong man’s fist. But they had left the hospital now, and there was a large café just across the street.

“Shall we go over there?” he suggested, with poorly feigned indifference.

“If you like,” Stella said.

He waited until they had found a table and their order was taken, before saying, “Excuse me for just a minute, please. There’s a telephone call I have to make.”

When he came back, he was a new man. He felt like laughing and singing, both at once. It was only when he saw Stella’s face again, still moist with tears, that he remembered to take on an appearance of concern.

They stirred idly at the glasses the waiter had brought them, but said nothing. Stella was gradually becoming more calm. He watched her carefully, waiting for the psychological moment when he might bring up the matter of the apartment. He also looked at her breasts again, and at that moment he was sure that he would go to bed with her. Finally, he summoned up strength enough to speak.

“I will never understand suicide,” he said gravely. “I have no argument against it, but it’s beyond my comprehension. Had you ever discussed it—with her?”

She told him that they had never talked about it, that she had known Simone for a very long time, but that she knew of absolutely nothing in her life that could have explained such an act. Trelkovsky suggested that it might, perhaps, have been the result of a disappointment in love, but Stella was sure that it was not. She knew of no serious relationship at all. Ever since Simone had come to Paris—her parents were in Tours—she had lived alone, seeing only a few friends. She had had two or three affairs, of course, but without consequence. Simone spent most of her leisure time reading historical novels. She worked in a bookshop.